We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Claudia Rodriguez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Claudia, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Okay I’ve been dying for someone to ask this question. So I was a junior in high school and around that time, Instagram was becoming very popular. Previously the only username I had ever had was “CupidClaudia” (yes, derived from the song “Cupid Shuffle”) for my Club Penguin account. I knew that wouldn’t fly as a 16 year old. I used the same method for my new handle, though. My favorite song at the time was “Suave” by Jerry Rivera. It’s a song about a girl who is just so cool and beautiful and perfect and I absolutely loved it. And also thought it was about me, haha. So I somehow decided to take the first half of my name (Clau) and mesh it with Suave. Then, one of my best friends at my high school started referring to me as Suave once he saw my username. A couple more people started calling me that, and then it became my nickname.

Flash forward to January 2021. I was doing Tony Robbins’ Personal Power course and on day 14 (I believe), he says, “Today, do the thing you have been putting off or pushing away that you know you want to do/will be good for you.” At the time, I knew I wanted to start a company, but I said I was going to legally form the LLC on my birthday (March 31st) of that year. Throughout that day of the course, Tony was incessant and essentially demanded the listener to stop what they were doing and do that thing they’ve been putting off! I stopped listening to the tape and filed the LLC. It was such a spur of the moment thing, when it asked for the company name, I just put SUAVE GLOBAL LLC with no thought.

So there you have it! I’m so glad to finally share that, haha.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Hi! I am Claudia Rodríguez and I am Nashville native now living in New York City! I am the founder and CEO of SUAVE MGMT, a talent management company. I got started in management working at Make Wake Artists, an artist management company in Nashville, known for managing the likes of Luke Combs, Nike Moon, and Hailey Whitters (to name a few). I interned there in the summer of 2017 and was hired on as the officer manager for the fall, while simultaneously studying at Vanderbilt (majoring in Spanish and Portuguese). I worked at Make Wake for 2 years, and then I left in February of 2020. Then we all know what happened in March of 2020. I was jobless, but got an internship at Red Light Management and worked under Holly Lowman, who manages a couple of Americana acts. Holly wanted to hire me on at Red Light after the summer internship was over, but the company was on a hiring freeze. She let me know she could not hire me and then said to me the most important thing I’d probably ever heard in my life: “There are no barriers to entry for artist management. All you need is an artist.”

There was a girl that I had been following on Instagram for a few months named Cosette. I loved her music and desperately wanted to manage her. I sent her an IG DM asking if she had a manager, and she didn’t even know what a manager was. We hopped on the phone, I told her about my experience, and she agreed to let me manage her. This was in August of 2020. Cosette and I grew so close, and we worked so well together, so we decided to make our relationship official and she signed to my newly formed management company, SUAVE MGMT, in January of 2021.

I formed SUAVE MGMT on January 15, 2021 with Cosette as my only client. Around this time, I had a former schoolmate reach out about management for their social media career. I had never done anything but music artist management, but I was down to try, and this changed everything for me. The influencer/content creator space is amazing. I will always love the music space/artist management, but once I got started in the creator space, I knew that I wanted to shift my business in that direction.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I love reading memoirs and biographies of different artists/actors/creatives. Their stories are so insightful and many of them really inform the behavior I want to exude as a businesswomen and business owner. Two books that were quite watershed for me were Charlie Wilson’s book “I Am Charlie Wilson” and “Shining Star” by Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire. The industry has progressed so much since their heyday, but hearing what they went through under different management/label agreements was mind-blowing. As someone who services artists, I think it is most important to hear from them and learn from them. Management is the most personal facet of a creative’s career, so I believe in order for a management company to succeed, the company needs to be just as much in an artist’s career as the artist themselves.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I mean, when I started this company I had no money. Like none. I had $1400 in my savings account and that was about it. Maybe $40 in my checking. But I wanted this so badly. I knew I would do anything to make it work. I did so many side hustles -grocery delivery (which I kind of miss – it was really fun), retail arbitrage, selling everything I own, dog-sitting, etc. But even though management was not paying the bills for about the first 8ish months I was doing it, it was always my 9-5. I invested the most time into it Monday-Friday. Before 9 and after 5, I was doing the hustles. All day Saturday and Sunday, I was doing the hustles. I stopped noticing when I was tired because it had just become my natural state. I am so blessed now that I don’t have to work that way. For people who are starting from the ground up, who are starting with $1440 or less, don’t give up. It’s so hard, it’s physically taxing, but I am so glad I did what I did and hustled the way I did. And I know that prioritizing my company, regardless of the little money it was bringing in at the time, was the smartest investment I could have made.

Contact Info:

• Website: suavemgmt.com
• Instagram: @suave_mgmt
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/suavemgmt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/suave_mgmt

Image Credits
Some shots from friends, some selfies and a screen shot from my client Dani’s TikTok!